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UNDER EXPOSED: Macro, Crypto Unicorns, Robinhood & NYC Takeaways
Recorded: July 1, 2025 Duration: 1:01:39Space Recording
Short Summary
Robinhood's recent product launch at Cannes introduces tokenized stocks and staking options, marking a significant shift in the integration of traditional finance with crypto. This move is expected to drive user engagement and reflects emerging trends in the financial landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, everyone.
Thank you for joining us here this morning, this afternoon, wherever you are at.
We're going to start the show here in just a minute.
Still getting a few speakers up on stage.
A couple of shout outs while we wait.
Husker having CJ, Harry Krishna, Azogss gm scrappy t ant vex all right
gmgm who else we got connor vibe trader all right vibe trader i like the sound of that
that's a little pfp too gm gm are a man of mystery maybe a woman find. We'll find out. Google it. GM, love to see you here as well.
All right.
Sims, whenever you're ready, let's kick it. so Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 32 of Underexposed, our weekly macro show,
hitting all the biggest topics and trends impacting crypto and Web3.
Today is Tuesday, July 1st. Folks, there are
days and weeks where nothing happens, and there are days where everything happens. And yesterday
feels like one of those days where so much happened. In fact, we may have crossed a chasm
in Trad5 meeting crypto.
The blurring is upon us.
And now the question, is that a good thing?
What does it mean for our crypto coins?
And how do we trade it?
We're going to break that all down on today's show.
I'm your host, Tyler D.
I've got my co-host in the house.
First up, D's art collector, coin stacker, trader.
Enjoying the summer, fresh off his trip to NYC.
Deez, GM, how are you doing?
Good. Got a few days in New York and had a really good time.
Saw a lot of people. Glad to be back home now.
We're glad to have you back.
And after a week off, we've got Jeeps back.
He was on the road. He was at Permissionless in NYC last week as well.
If you don't know Jeeps, he's an early stage crypto VC.
Davos is in the capital markets.
Where's a lot of hats?
Jeeves GM, how are you doing?
GM, guys.
I'm just thankful to be back with you.
It's been a long tour.
We lost him.
And we're excited to have him back.
We had this issue with Manda on Vomor Hour earlier today, so hopefully it's not persistent with Jeebs.
We'll catch up with him shortly when he comes back on.
While he's joining us, I want to give a reminder to folks,
we are live on Kik.
So if you want to follow along with the stream,
go check us out there.
Make sure to follow the channel.
That's where we're going to be streaming going forward
for all of our content. Across FOMO Hour, Rect Radio, and Underexposed, along with more.
So go check us out there. And again, one more housekeeping note before we get started. Quick
disclosure, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the
views or opinions of any organizations they're associated with. We are here to share insights,
provoke thought, and maybe even stir some debate, but this is not, and I repeat, not financial
advice. While we talk about markets, investments, and trends, remember, your financial decisions
should be made with the help of your own research or with advice from a licensed professional.
Now, let's get into it. Folks, a couple of big topics for for today and we're going to dive into the robin hood
and just tokenize stocks topic in depth here in a bit but i want to start with some macro and we
don't have peter on with us he is our typical macro expert so maybe we'll go a little bit
lighter but i do want to go around the horn because a lot has happened from a macro standpoint in the past week as well.
Take a look at our coins overall.
It has been a chop week.
You wouldn't know much has happened by just looking at the board.
Bitcoin up 1% on the week at $106K.
ETH down half a percent, $2426.
It is just hard to get that token to pump. Solana up 2% at 148, but actually down fairly substantially from a brief spike yesterday.
We'll get into that here in a minute as well.
So what happened?
Well, since last show, we had the ceasefire.
That was the major news.
I believe that happened since we last went live.
It feels like ages ago at this point.
Immediately after the iron, Israel sees fire.
Attention back on the trade deals.
Seems like we have a deal with China on the table.
The S&P making fresh all-time highs and officially recording the fastest recovery from a 15% or more decline in history.
We've got Donald Trump pressuring Powell now.
I think just today, he continues to double down on this,
saying anyone would be better than Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
I think Powell came back and saying if it wasn't for the Trump tariffs,
he already would have cut rates.
I saw that headline right before the show.
So that continues.
And there was another comment from Trump on Sunday where he basically warned senators who were taking a part and talking about amendments to the big, beautiful bill to say, hey, take it easy.
Don't worry about cutting too much. We are going to grow our way out of it,
which a lot of folks have interpreted as the U.S.
and Trump kind of giving the green light to continue printing money and inflating away the dollar.
So that's what's been happening in macro.
I think a lot of eyes on that big, beautiful bill and what's going to end up being in that here
as that perhaps gets finalized on Trump's desk this week.
From a crypto standpoint, Kraken launched its crack at going after Venmo. I think arguably
biggest news of the week, month, quarter, Robinhood. They had a massive product debut
event at Cannes in France yesterday. They unleashed tokenized stocks, perps, staking, pre-IPO markets, and even more.
So that was a huge, huge day for them.
At the same time, we've got prominent investors like Rick Edelman,
now recommending 10% to 40% of portfolios in crypto, up from just 1% to 2% just a few months or a few years ago.
And the other big headline here, we've got the first Solana staking ETF set to go live for trading
tomorrow. So that is a big one as well. Certainly a lot to unpack.
Deez, how are you feeling?
Just temperature check.
We thought it was going to be joyful June.
Maybe the Iran-Israel conflict derailed that for a bit.
Are you feeling like we're in for a jubilant July,
meaning kind of the summer of risk comes back on,
or do you think it's going to be more July chop?
What's your current read?
Have you seen the propaganda going around
that shows the average returns in July versus other months?
Oh, I have. Let me try to find that.
So I am cautiously optimistic
based off this sole piece of propaganda.
Haven't really done much since last week when we last talked.
I don't think I've bought or sold anything.
I did almost sell some Solana on the news yesterday at like $160,000.
And I didn't.
And in hindsight, that might have been a mistake
because it's already back down to 148.
But for better or worse,
I have not done much since we last talked.
And I'm cautiously optimistic in July.
Look at that.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
We have the S&P at a new all-time high,
closed last week at it.
And it went further up on Monday. And I think today it isP at a new all-time high, closed last week at it, and it went further up on Monday.
And I think today it is not at a new high,
but it's right around there.
It's like breakeven.
And it's still early today.
So I'm cautiously optimistic just based on that.
But I'm not taking any big stands.
I feel like there was another time where we were,
oh, this is the S&P returns. There's a crypto version of this chart.
We are now so correlated to it that we're just hoping if S&P does what it does in July, then crypto does better.
Yeah, I got to find the crypto. Because we were doing this, or I was specifically doing this for crypto i remember a few months back um and there was a
month where oh i think it may have been february uh let me see so i've got one for ethereum here
let's pull this up just in the spirit of uh having some fun while we wait for jeeves to get back
for ethereum fuck i mean i think so i think this is in line with broader crypto, but February is historically a green month.
And I think we were talking about that a lot in Q1
and it ended up being a very red month in crypto.
So I look like shit on this chart, so maybe we're due.
Yeah.
I don't want to say it looks like shit,
but it's worse than a coin flip
it's one of the worst months off the chart
I'll admit I've been surprised
seeing that
the July returns chart going around
because it's the whole mantra of
sell a main go away
so one thing too to consider here
is that
for most of crypto's life
it did not feel correlated to the S&P
and the S&P correlation
does feel like a relatively new thing.
If we're going back a span of 10 years,
the S&P correlation feels like
it's like three years old in my head.
So that would be my one caveat
of differences there.
Yeah, no, that is a good point.
Jeeves, I think we've got you back.
Thank you for joining us.
I was kind of running through some of the macro headlines
that have taken place.
Ceasefire, trade deals on the table,
Trump pressuring Powell.
Curious for your macro read,
maybe what's jumping out to you
concerned about the big, beautiful bill Curious for your macro read, maybe what's jumping out to you?
Concerned about the big, beautiful bill?
Any just broad stroke takes, feelings, reactions headed into this summer?
What's up top of mind for you?
Yeah.
As Peter always mentions, piercing volatility will just continue for the period of time that we're in right now.
Can you guys hear me all right?
We can, yeah.
Cool, perfect.
Yeah, it feels like, you know, I've been a little bit checked out the past couple of weeks, but getting back into it right now.
The general things on the macro side seem to just be stuff we talked about earlier this year.
You know, I think earlier we had talked about conflict resolution.
It's felt like we've gotten into more conflict
and that not many conflicts have been resolved,
which is still just a massive problem sitting on top of us.
I am hopeful still that we get conflict resolution
in the Middle East, in Russia, Ukraine,
and start to see some stability in the world just
geopolitically. I'll have more insight on that next week. This week, one of my good friends is
coming into town, and she's kind of my geopolitical expert in both the Middle East and Russia,
Ukraine. She lived there for a bit. One of the smartest people I know kind of works in that field. So I want to try and get some info and hopefully have some insights for the group
next week, but hopeful there. And then, you know, you guys talked about Powell before.
It's really clear that Trump is going to find a way to, you know, do an apprentice style
selection of the next Fed chair. He appointed Powell and he
doesn't want to run that back again where he doesn't have someone he can control a bit more.
And he'll, you know, make this a show. And this next person who will be sort of pseudo put in
place months before Powell leaves, will start to tout, oh, we're going to, he's going to
foreshadow. He's going to say, as soon as i'm around i'm gonna cut 100 points you know whatever it may be um and the markets can at least start to
see what's going to happen in the future and have some certainty i think that goes good and bad uh
you know to some extent how do you guys feel about the idea of a shadow effect there. Do you think it's going to be Besson?
It's not.
Is Besson very non-zero for that role right now?
I'm going to pull up Polymarket and see if they've got
the market on this.
I think he'll have a really big
part in the selection process,
but I'm not sure he'll be the
head there. Is there a Polymarket?
There is. I'm pulling it up. Breaking.
Wow. Besson is 19%.
Number two on the board.
Pretty good.
I think perhaps because...
Kevin Warr.
Kevin Warr.
Yeah, he's been...
And Waller.
I feel like those two have been pushed pretty heavily.
I think the caveat with this market is that it requires a decision by December 31st.
So no announcement is still the leader at 30%.
So that is swaying this a bit.
But that feels about right to me.
I mean, Besson is one in five leading, one of the leading candidates.
Doesn't that seem crazy, though?
He's busy. he's the, you know, he's busy.
Right.
Treasury secretary.
Yeah.
So that raises the next question.
So who would he,
who would replace him as treasury secretary?
What's more important role?
I don't know that that's the best for that.
I think basically,
I mean,
I think Trump would just want someone who's going to kind of give in to
what he wants.
How do you guys feel about it in general, though?
How do you feel about the idea of having a shadow Fed chair who is effectively foreshadowing everything they're going to do?
We'd be going from a relatively uncertain environment to a very certain environment.
But there's probably some ethical things to discuss here.
Yeah, not a fan of it.
I mean, Powell was appointed, should serve out his term,
and shouldn't be undermined.
And I actually am generally a fan of Powell.
I think he's done a pretty good job.
And I understand why he's not rushing to cut rates.
Trump introduced the tariffs.
They keep extending it with the delays.
I think we're expecting perhaps another delay to come
maybe as soon as next week,
which puts Powell
in a pretty tricky spot.
Yeah.
I think they're reactionary.
That's my biggest critique at this point.
Wasn't that
kind of his job?
He has to react to the data? i think he determines what his job is
you know he if he wanted to he could get ahead of things he determines that he needs to wait for
the data run the dual mandate you know they they can change that. It's true.
I think we're going to get rate cuts this year,
but that is likely dependent on some resolution to tear situation ahead of September.
I think my gut is he's not going to cut in July,
even though it's a 20% chance.
I mean, CME futures are saying September is a certainty.
It's at 90%
for one or two cuts.
What do you think that's pricing in, Tyler? So if we're looking at September and Powell's there, he's the Fed chair, we're clearly looking at some deterioration in the labor market at that point,
because it's not likely that inflation is going to get down to their 2% target.
So is this pricing in significant deterioration
in the labor market effectively?
I think it's a weakness in the labor market,
which we're already starting to see.
But I think inflation is,
it feels under, it's under control to me.
I went grocery shopping yesterday, and I did not have any sticker shock.
Everything felt appropriately priced.
Gas is under control.
We're used to it?
But we're not talking about ongoing inflation rates, right?
So we're not ever going to go back to what it was five years ago.
We're talking about continued ongoing inflation, and that is – it feels under control.
I understand that if some of these tariffs go through, that's going to hike perhaps costs some of these goods.
But we haven't really seen it.
I don't think – we're not seeing it yet.
Just on my read.
Yeah.
Stinger shock for me right now is more or less when I go out to eat with my family.
Yeah.
And it's like three of us and it's like $120 at a casual restaurant.
I'm like, what happened?
$20 cocktails happened.
Like we got lunch.
You guys were just in NYC.
What's the price of a cocktail in manhattan
uh it's same 30 bucks you paid 30 yeah we went to a super nice oyster place and
the cocktails there were like 19 which i don't want to say sounded cheap but like when you're
spending three to five dollars per oyster uh a cocktail that's
the price of five oysters feels not bad i think uber is where i saw the biggest inflation oh dude
because the bridge tools crazy yeah i don't want to know the math on how much i spent on ubers but
it's got to be pushing a thousand dollars in four days how's a multiple like 90 uber it was insane
i also made a mistake of staying in manhattan
so the manhattan ubers are like because you're going back and forth from williamsburg every one
is like 60 plus bucks um whereas usually i stay in train i i still didn't take the train
i i still there was a point in time too where there was a
stop uh one block from my hotel and it took me directly to the building i needed to go to which
was the oculus building like the world trade center and i still just took an uber because i
was like ah yeah no i'm just uh it was bad it's part of the cultural experience for me i did have a day where i
decided to walk from tribeca to williamsburg um it's like a five mile walk and by the time i got
on the bridge i was like man why am i doing this but uh we powered through it it was good
how was the weather when you were there it felt there was one day when i was there
um i'll give a quick recap actually yeah, of NFC or Permissionless.
These, and then I'd love to hear about NFC NYC because I think they overlapped.
Here's my read, right?
Permissionless has gone on.
This is Permissionless 4.
Last year was in Salt Lake City, and I really liked it just because it was a change of scenery.
The city felt like it was dominated by Permissionless. So you kind of ran into the people
that you wanted to see. Anytime you host something in New York, it's just a different beast. You're
not running into anyone unless you're on the grounds and seeing folks there. While there,
what I'll say is the location was subpar. It was sort of in like the south area of Brooklyn. There
wasn't that great of public transportation to get there.
Ubers were incredibly expensive to get down there.
The location itself was a bit of an odd conference venue.
It was this place called Industry City, sort of a mix of like builders, restaurants, stores.
Think of like five vertical buildings stacked next to each other.
And then there's a walkway in between that connects each.
That's open air.
And, you know, they obviously couldn't predict the heat that was going to happen.
But there was, you know, doors open.
Rooms were a little warm.
Some of the sponsors, you know, who I assume paid a pretty fair amount of money, were basically
outdoors in that heat.
So imagine, you know, you're the, you're the person
on the marketing team that has to sit out there. And then the setup was just strange. Like it was
hard to, it was just tough to navigate. You had to sort of figure things out, not very intuitive.
So I would say venue location was not that great. They did have a pretty solid lineup of speakers.
It did also seem like the sponsors themselves, like there was just less this year.
Maybe there was areas that I didn't see where sponsors existed, but a lot of the sponsors were Bitcoin related.
So we'd seen, you know, Stacks, for example, and the likes of that.
A lot of like Bitcoin related stuff.
And Uniswap had a pretty big booth there they
were doing some some fun uh some fun things i actually have this bad boy right here i thought
about maybe oh back in this live pack rep the uniswapy maybe we'll do it toward the end here
for time uh but i would say overall, I just thought the location was bad.
It'll really make me think about where they do it next time and made me think about conferences in New York and how accessible they are for me to get there.
But overall, like, minus the weather, which was the worst part in New York, the one day felt like 106, super humid, just brutal, brutal, brutal weather.
Like, you walk out of your hotel, you're sweating.
It smells disgusting because it's New York City.
Very unideal.
I feel like NYC is a great destination for a conference
if you want to go check out NYC.
Less so for the conference itself.
I think there are other metros that are a little tighter,
more compact.
I've also got,
I think I'm not even traveling to these conferences like you are.
And I feel like there's conference fatigue.
It feels like there's one every,
every week.
Like there,
if can is going on right now.
A lot of people skipped permissionless to go there.
And I think you have to be really strategic if you're an event planner, how you do it.
New York's great.
My best experiences was not the conference.
It was meeting people one-on-one for coffee, lunch, dinner.
We hosted a happy hour with the Metalayer Ventures guys and had a group of maybe 25 people there.
That was amazing.
But the event itself was not the highlight of my trip at all
deez how about you i was uh your your version of nft in my city good you know as usual i never go
to the conference never have tickets um never go to any of that stuff just had a lot of dinners
and lunches and small hangouts with people um Had a nighttime party with Schiller and Dave
and the All Ships team, which OpenSea sponsored
and had a good turnout there.
First event we ever did without socks,
I mean without shoes, socks only.
And definitely want to do more of that.
It was a way more grounding and respectful environment
when people aren't just throwing drinks on the ground
and fucking stepping over it.
But when you're in your socks,
you have a little bit more awareness
of the shit that you're doing.
So I don't know.
Had a good time.
I was only there for three days.
Quick head run.
Played a lot of Pokemon Go.
So that was fun too.
But I missed the whole heat wave, Jeeps.
So one day I got there, it was 80. Uh, the next day
it was a high of 75. And then the last day, I think it was a high 85. So I, I timed it perfectly.
Um, I went to, I got, I got there at like 9am. I woke up at 5am, took a flight, got there at 9am
and went straight to Dye's event, which's event which was at the Oculus building and that
had a really good turnout spent like three or four hours there honestly just from that event
I saw like 80 percent of the people I planned to see when I went to New York so it felt like a
really good start to the week and then other than that made it to a couple gallery showings and
happy hours and stuff and it was a fun event for the Snowfro unveiling for the Glitch Marfa residency.
I saw a lot of people there.
It's fun right now because the space feels a little smaller.
You just have Beeple and Matt Hall and a bunch of other people just walking around
being normal people because they aren't getting stopped every three seconds to be bothered um and i think that's one of the
nicer things right now is like you know people can just be without being bothered and the people
around are uh all really good people and if you didn't make it don't don't feel any fomo or
anything i know it's expensive to go to new y York it's expensive to go to all the events and take time away from what you're doing so I think any of the people
who are uh shaming people on the timeline for not being able to make it are fucking idiots too
saw a little bit of that felt bad yeah uh with you there jeebs do you have any more
conferences on your near term travel schedule radar?
No, I don't.
We're expecting in the next month or so.
Oh, nice.
I'm home for the time being.
Number two.
Number deuce.
Yeah.
The issue is like I get fatigued from traveling as well.
Like there are some people that in this industry that turn conferencing into a lifestyle and that's just not for me you know i enjoy it i enjoy like one a quarter see the people i want to see uh
there's just too much noise and i think some people just want to go they want to go be speakers
they want to go out to nice dinners they want live, there's a lifestyle that goes along with it.
And I think there's a lot of people that want to live that lifestyle, but that's not for me,
but, um, but I do enjoy it when I get to go. Well, I get it. We're older now. In my, uh,
twenties, I lived that consultant lifestyle. I was on the road three, four days a week,
seven to eight years straight. Uh, and I loved it back then, but I'm in a different
phase. I want to pull the conversation back. We were talking about rate cuts, inflation,
also one of the bull cases for Bitcoin and crypto. And I wrote a whole newsletter about this. I want
to at least spend a couple minutes on it. I thought it was very notable that a prominent investor, Rick Elderman, $300 billion in assets under management, 1.3 million
clients, has now upped his crypto portfolio allocation recommendations to 10% on the
conservative side, 25% moderate, 40% for aggressive investors. He went on to talk about what makes up that.
It's primarily Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then the Bitwise top 10,
which is also notably 70% Bitcoin and Ethereum.
So he's heavily Bitcoin, ETH, plus a little bit more of your top 10 alts, effectively.
And I'm curious for your take on this.
And geez, maybe I'll throw it to you first.
Are you, if you don't mind sharing,
are you in this bucket slash,
are you comfortable recommending your family and friends go up to 40%
crypto?
Check out the name of the show, Tyler.
Look, I am not comfortable making this recommendation.
Wow.
10% is probably like the highest I would recommend a normal person be allocated to crypto in general, let alone Bitcoin.
So I think this is a really, really, really bold strategy here.
And honestly, I love to see it.
You know, I think it's hard for me to go tell some, I do tell people when they ask, how do I get exposure to crypto?
Oh my God, it's going up, blah, blah, blah. And my general take is look like if I think Bitcoin
is going to be a million dollars per token at some point in time, then the price today looks cheap
because the general reaction I get is like, oh, it's
$100,000.
It's too expensive already.
You can't buy here.
And it's like, you should listen to Underexposed more.
We can explain to you why generally we think it's going a lot higher.
And there's a lot of bulk cases for it to go a lot higher.
With that said, there's risks associated to it.
And I don't want to be on the tail for recommending someone full port their net worth.
So, look, I love to see, you know, really well-respected advisors and people in the financial industry seeing the vision of Bitcoin, recommending it to their clients and publicly making this claim.
This is a really bold claim for him to go out there and say.
So I think all around love to see it.
Are you guys comfortable
recommending to friends and family they go 40 percent these i'm gonna let you in
now depends on the person right like you're not gonna recommend to your 70 year old plus
grandparents they need to have 40 of their net worth in crypto. But if you're going to argue toward your younger brother
who's 25 or younger about his allocations,
then maybe 40% is even too low.
So I think anybody taking any blanket recommendation
without looking at what point they are at in life
and what they need in the short and midterm
versus the long term.
You can't just give a blanket recommendation.
It's just way too dynamic
depending on the people's situation.
I have a lot of thoughts.
And I've been thinking about this consciously quite a bit.
Tactically, because my primary 401k
doesn't have any crypto exposure.
I ran a poll last week.
What do you think outperforms over the next 10 to 20 years,
Bitcoin or S&P index?
And 90% of people said Bitcoin.
And I asked a follow-up,
what percentage of you have it in your 401ks?
And it was less than half.
And there are hurdles still to holding crypto and Bitcoin in 401ks.
Hurdles that I have to deal with.
I have Vanguard, so I can't invest in IBIT or other things.
So I'm going to have to change providers.
But it just made me thinking, it had me thinking,
if you think Bitcoin is going to outperform the S&P index,
then why aren't you more heavily allocated to it?
And then even further, which individual stocks do you think you could pick to outperform it?
And if you can't do that, why aren't you allocating more to it?
I feel like I sound like this crypto bro,
but when I think about it like that,
it makes me think, wow, I should have 40% to 50% Bitcoin.
I mean, that seems about right.
I have like 25%,
I think, or so of our liquid assets in stocks and bonds.
Mostly stocks, a little bit of bonds.
And all that money and fidelity, none of it is in IBIT or crypto.
But then my crypto exposure is very heavily Bitcoin and hype right now.
To the point where over 50% of our liquid net worth
is Bitcoin and hype.
I don't know.
I guess it depends.
For me too, I don't have a 401k per se.
It's like a Fidelity brokerage account.
So I can have a lot more flexibility with that money.
And I can just pay the taxes and move it.
I don't have any like uh
penalty for taking money out of it early and my traditional ira that i just like top up every
year in the roth those are all just really boring stocks and bonds too there's no uh i'm not like
trading ibit or hood or coin or circle in any of those accounts which maybe i should in the wrong but i'm not
yeah that's what i've been doing these my um my exposure in my retirement account is from just
retirement accounts i've had throughout my career primarily yeah then rolled from 401ks into iras
now my iras are primarily managed through through Robinhood and they'll match me,
I think 2%. And so what I've been doing is maxing out my Roth IRA and just buying all IBIT via that.
At the beginning of the year, max it, IBIT, done. And Robinhood, I think,
matches me 2% on that. God bless him.
God bless Robinhood.
Indeed.
Well, let's pivot there.
I want to put a pin in this conversation because I want Peter's take on this as well.
So maybe we'll revisit this next week when he's back.
If I had to pick a stock to perhaps outperform Bitcoin, at least the next near term.
Hood's on my short list.
It certainly is, and it's more on that list after yesterday.
So quick recap for folks.
If they missed the news, we had Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood,
at a product launch event in Cannes.
He did, and did in a panel,
there was a panel with Vitalik on later as well.
They rolled out a full suite of products,
tokenized stock trading,
their own chain on Arbitrum and Arbitrum L2,
perp trading in Europe,
Ethan Sol staking for US customers,
and even more.
They also announced that part of their tokenized stock trading will also include private secondary market stocks
like OpenAI, SpaceX.
It was, I want to call it a bombshell.
I think it beat my expectations
for what I thought was going to take place at the event.
We had Vlad Tenet, the event. We had Vlad, the CEO.
He was literally whiteboarding in a full suit with an ascot around his neck.
I thought he was very, very impressive during the presentation as well.
And it got my gears turning.
We talked about hood on the show.
I think Peter was long hood short circle.
That's been a fairly decent trade.
I don't have any hood exposure. I've been
thinking pretty hard if I should.
Jeeps, I want to
toss it to you. Curious if you watched
the event yesterday,
high-level reactions to that
and then perhaps thoughts on the
stock itself.
I watched a good chunk of it.
Big respect for Vlad and what he's doing. I've been
a big fan of Robinhood, early user. I think I started using it the first year they came out.
Love the product. I am long Robinhood, although I did trim some today, mostly because I just have a few general thoughts around it, but I saw an opportunity I wanted to go after.
And this has become like a pretty big winner.
You know, I shared yesterday, I had various buys between 34, 50 and 40.
Wow.
That's kind of where I accumulated my position.
It's impressive.
When the market crashed,
this was my highest conviction play by far. Just knowing that Robinhood wanted to move further into
crypto and capital markets. And they're the best position from a distribution standpoint.
They have a lot of young folks that use Robinhood. It's their first time trading stocks. They have
such a clean interface. Huge fan of the company i understand
that there's some people that um you know have a sour taste still from the gamestop days back in
the day when they kind of they pulled the rug but i think they've come a long way since them um
so yeah look like robin's announcements yesterday tyler are are massive i mean staking for u.s
customers is great easy business for them.
I think everyone's looking at this and they're like, oh, this is, you know, they're offering
products to people in Europe. And what does this, what matters? What matters is what one of the guys
on stage yesterday said, said, look, these products are ready for U.S. capital markets
when they're legal. We are. Think about it this way. They're testing
them in Europe. They are refining them in Europe. They're making them better. And once permitted,
you're going to have perps on Robinhood in the United States. And so I think we should anticipate
that everything you see now is foreshadowing what's to come. With that said, they run a lot
of businesses. They're spread
pretty thin. And I think that they're just running a little hot right now. And so I'm going to look
for an entry to buy as much as I can if we go into some type of dip or correction territory,
because I think that Robinhood has the potential to be the company of our generation,
the financial services company of our generation.
Wow.
There's almost no doubt in my mind there.
So really, really excited about everything that they're moving forward.
Well, keep me posted on that.
If you find an entry,
I'd like to tell you in.
I want to drill into your foreshadowing comment.
And then I'll talk to you for your takes as well
that was one of my broad takeaways
all these products, this is a huge
this is basically kind of a paradigm shift
this is the blurring of Tradify and crypto
it's happening in front of us
but it's going to take time for this to play out
some of these products are just going live in Europe
and your reaction might be
oh well there's not as many users
or as much money it's all just them getting ready for the regulatory clarity that's coming in
the US. So these will all be live in the US. It's just a matter of time. Vlad also laid out the
roadmap for the tokenized stock trading, which I thought was very interesting. They're starting out
effectively in a custody model,
trading 24 hours a day, five days a week, then 24-7.
And then they're going to move from a custody model to this on-chain model
where users will be able to take their tokenized stocks
and integrate them within Ethereum DeFi
where you can get loans against your stock assets.
You can loop them.
But anything that you can do on chain
and DeFi right now, I think that's a massive unlock.
But it's
also one of those that we're in the
very early stages of. And a lot of these
tokenized stocks are probably going to have
poor liquidity early on.
There's going to be spreads.
It very well may not make sense
to put any serious capital at play
buying tokenized stocks in july
of 2025 but it'll likely make more sense in july of 2026 so that was just one of my reactions top
of mind for the for your foreshadowing piece and what's to come so i do kind of want to level set
where we actually are now but d's curious for your thoughts. What were your high-level reactions, takeaways,
and or if you are exposed to hoodstock and if you want to be?
Sadly, not exposed to it.
Takeaway is that I'm curious to see what the appetite is
as people use some of the new things they're putting out.
I was looking yesterday for some takes on Hyperliquid
and all this news.
And some of the people were mentioning
some of the fees on Robinhood and some other stuff
and how Hyperliquid could still be a little bit more competitive
for whales who are pushing big size
versus the average retail investor.
I'm not looking to buy a hood here at $92.
I think what Jeeves did was smart,
trim some into this hype.
And I don't know at what point I would buy it,
but I'm not somebody who generally buys stocks.
I feel like we talk about this all the time. I don't really... Maybe I'm not somebody who generally buys stocks. I feel like we talk
about this all the time. I don't really. Maybe I should buy some stocks on Solana now that we can
do that. But no, I don't have any hood exposure. And in general, any easier way to onboard retail,
I think is just like net bullish for the space. So it was good to see some of that.
Do you use Robinhood at all these I haven't
used it in like four years I was using it 2020 2021 um and then you know like I was using it
more to punt options and like try to hit a high multiple really quickly like I wasn't um
I take that back I think I bought a couple of stocks and traded them 2017 through 2020.
But after that, I was like,
well, I'll just throw less than $10,000 in here
and try to get lucky with options.
Which I did not get lucky with options.
And that's probably why I don't use that platform anymore.
That's probably why I don't use that platform anymore.
There was that phase in 2021, right?
Right when COVID hit and before crypto really exploded,
there was a big, like everyone was doing YOLO options.
Yeah.
And it felt like that was running on Robinhood.
I would, I plead the fifth.
I just know I lost my options deposit
and did not put more back in there.
Yeah, I'm with you there.
I am curious, what are your thoughts?
This morning on FOMWire,
we did not talk about hype impact.
Do you think hype is impacted?
Either bullish or bearish
or just totally neutral
from Robinhood big players
getting into perps?
I think I can see both arguments.
On the bullish slash neutral side side i don't think the overlap
between the average robin hood user is uh that great with what the average hype user is right
now um it's a pretty like it's not retail friendly like if you're trying to explain
to a friend who wants to trade perps hey hey, you're going to go into your bank account
and you're going to move money to a centralized exchange
like Kraken or Coinbase.
And then you're going to move that money to your wallet.
Okay, you need to back up this seed phrase.
And if you lose this thing, you're going to lose all your money.
Okay, now that you got that,
we're going to move that money from your wallet onto hype.
Okay, now you actually need to pay $3 to $8 a month for a VPN so that you can go to
Mexico to use the platform. Okay, now you're on, here you go. Versus Robinhood is open up, face ID,
enter amount, confirm, you're in. I think we probably weren't going to onboard much retail into Hype anyway.
I think if perps get just more adoption in general, that's good.
And I think the bear case would be more around
you think the users who would use Hype decide to use Robinhood instead
because there is a lower barrier to entry or better UX.
So for me, I didn't sell any yesterday.
I thought about selling something like 40.5.
I kind of felt like a nice place to sell.
But just like Solana, I just held it because I'm an idiot.
So that probably means we'll be at like 35 by next show.
But in general, I'm not...
I think in general, just more
people adopting
perps is probably a good thing.
And if...
I'm assuming there's
a whole generation of traders on Robinhood
who've never traded perpetual
contracts and have only traded
either underlying stocks or
options.
I think you can... maybe I'm just stupid,
but I think you can argue that perps are easier to understand
and offer some similar upside to options,
where with the leverage you can get on perps,
you can get some option-like returns,
but instead of trying to understand all the variables
that play with auction or with
options you're at the um you know here's the leverage here's your liquidation price if you're
right you can make this much money and it's like a i think a more easier concept to grasp for the
average gambler way it's way better it's significantly easier to explain it to someone. Perps are a way better product.
I wish I had perps for some things I might want to short right now.
How do we short circle on perps, Jeeves?
I think perps are great until you get liquidated a few times.
But that's like when your option expires is worthless.
It's like the same feeling.
Right.
With the key exception, and sorry, Jeeves, the one feeling right with the key exception and sorry jeebs the one
key difference is the time aspect right so if i've got 12 month calls i can still survive
the flash 30 but you're paying for that in some way or another like the the time premium or
whatever fucking um greek symbol that represents time amongst all
the other greek symbols that you need to think about james i cut you off go ahead yeah i was
just gonna say like we talked about this a few weeks ago i mean it's all about knowing what's
the game you're playing the surprise and how do you want to play it like for me maybe there's
some shorts i've wanted to take recently.
And I express that via long dated options
because I know what's, I have a strong feeling
about what's going to happen.
I just think it's going to take a while to get there.
And perps are not a great vehicle for that
because you pay a funding rate on the amount
that you're borrowing to lever up in your position.
And so over time, right? Like you're going to lever up in your position. And so over time, right,
like you're going to pay a premium for your short, meaning like I need some buffer there.
If it's $100 and I'm paying a $20 premium, maybe I need it to get to $80 to break even to then be able to start profiting if I choose to execute it at that time. Theoretically,
you want to sell it prior, potentially. There's all sorts
of strategies. There's lots of ways you can go about it. To Deez's point, curbs are so simple.
It is, I have $1,000. 3x leverage means I have $3,000. If the price goes to negative whatever,
it's all gone. But if it goes the other way, I effectively have 3x my position to go long.
It's so simple. And I think perps were tried at one point in financial markets in the past and
didn't work. But I actually think this is a historic moment where Robinhood, by tokenizing
these stocks and having the liquidity available on chain to get long or short,
is really rolling out perps to the masses.
This amazing financial product that crypto loves and has worked in crypto really well,
now has this opportunity to get to normal people.
And I think by the end of this year, perps will be a really common way that people will want to get degeny.
And you can tell this because zero-day options are incredibly popular.
People that are trading zero-day options are going to be trading perps.
I would agree with you on that.
And the whole trend direction we're going towards hypergamification of everything it's in line with perps and i think there's a lot of similarities between like tokenized stocks are not a new thing
they were they've been around for years as i understand it but they didn't really take off
and it just wasn't the right time it wasn't the right players now that the bigger players are
here and it feels more like the right time with everything else happening with just crypto going mainstream,
being embraced,
being given regulatory cushion
and a fundamental basis for it right now.
So I think now's the time for this.
Actually, I'm curious for your thoughts
on the tokenized stock piece as well.
We just talked about perps.
Do you think it's big? Do you think people are going to use it will you use it yeah i want to touch on one quick point
these made about hyper liquid which is you know my feelings there in general but i am seeing now
these mobile hyper liquid apps and i think they're having really simple onboarding process via Apple Pay and other
stuff to be able to get money into that ecosystem to go long, short, whatever, right? Full interface
on mobile. And that is, I think, the kicker here to bring in Normies on. If someone can create
like the moonshot of Hyperliquid to be able to get these products to people, you now have the,
you know, have you
seen like the I've got a feeling sports gambling commercials? It's going to be like, I got a
feeling about ETH. I'm going to, you know, get my YOLO bet. And I think that's going to find its own
product market fit with more of a retail crowd over time. Going to like tokenized stocks.
Going to like tokenized stocks, I don't know, Tyler.
I think I can see the benefit for certain people, certain funds, certain strategies
that people want to do, but I'm not like a big stock picker.
Like once again, like when I have a feeling or a hunch on a stock, I like to take a direction
with it, either spot or sometimes options, just because I think options can be wonky sometimes.
So for me, I don't know that this is something that like I need or I want.
Like I think of crypto as my crypto and stocks as my stocks.
And I'm not thinking of like my Bitcoin NVIDIA ratio and how I want to go play that.
That's just not how I'm
approaching it. But I do see the appeal to traders who cross both sides of it and funds that cross
both sides of it and the huge unlock here for them to be able to say, OK, like our Bitcoin position
has done really well. Let's roll this into Tesla with one click and we don't have to think too
much about it. so it does create
like this new dimension for traders to be able to easily swap in and out of asset classes and that's
a really big unlock i think it just allows you to do more on chain yeah go ahead these one important
thing with them too is you're opening up like um trading outside of normal market windows right
so if you want to buy the tokenized stock
after the market closes,
it's not like the tokenized stock market closes, right?
Unless I misread the announcements there.
You do lose some of the investor protection stuff though, right?
It's technically not the stock.
Is there a way that it can de-peg
or is there some risk as to price following
the actual stock um due to like liquidity concerns on the tokenized stock versus the underlying stock
like personally for me if i was going to buy a stock yeah like personally for me if i was going
to buy a stock i'd probably just buy it in my Fidelity account. If and only if it's during market hours, and if it isn't and I want to try to make a play then, maybe I go for the tokenized stock.
And the other interesting thing I risks of owning tokenized stock
and liquidity and tag concerns with the stock it's supposed to represent.
Yeah.
There's a really big winner here out of this,
and its name is Market Makers.
Because at the end of the day,
let's say this makes up 0.5% half percent or a percent of the total available trading volume for Tesla or NVIDIA or whatever.
These do need to remain at spot value.
And spot value has, like you said, daily trading, et cetera.
Trading this stuff during the weekdays or sorry, during hours that are closed is crazy to me.
Because the second that the market's open,
these things are at par.
These market makers are going to eat, I think,
on the opportunity to be able to keep these level.
And they're, you know, they, I'm sure at this point,
have highly sophisticated systems to do that.
And look, you go check out who helps Robinhood out
with this stuff.
You're looking at the Citadels of the world,
the Winter Mutes of the world. there's big organizations that are very sophisticated and they're going to see the clear opportunity here that's right they they know the clear
opportunity here and are already playing likely in this space to ensure that price remains steady
so like sure maybe on a saturday night the nvidia Nvidia low float on chain coin can go up quite a bit,
but that's not going to last very long.
You know,
it'll,
it'll find home eventually.
Long enough for me,
for my 20 X Nvidia perp on my tokenized Nvidia stock to close it out.
Hopefully.
One commenter,
Sir Pink here is saying you also lose on fees and
spread yesterday uh micro strategy stock was 10 more than any brokerage you need to be aware of
that i do think that will likely go down over time again like as as this gets more and more used
i think yesterday was it was quite literally day one um but something to to aware of. For me, it's like
where is your big ball of capital? Do you
operate on a crypto standard? Do you operate
on a fiat standard? If you're more on a crypto standard
now, you've got that opportunity
to say, oh, I'm actually more
bullish on hood stock
than Bitcoin over the next three months.
I want to
diversify out of my chill house position.
The big unlock is perps here, Tyler, I think.
Perps on stocks is going to be the big unlock that people have.
It's a big one.
I think there's opportunity for pretty big manipulation on it too,
just given the very low float on it.
It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think we just need to sort of see what happens here. Butow from alliance now qw had a great tweet said uh tokenized
stonks won't kill alts stonk perps will kill all so he thinks that the perps on stock will kill
all because there's a constant supply of fresh narratives, insane leverage adjusted volatility.
Interesting.
I think it's a fair take.
And what do we got here from Beanie?
It's similar, right?
So this is my final thoughts on this conversation.
I think a fairly consensus take.
Tokenized stocks, bullish for stocks, bearish for crypto.
That's kind of in line with what Chow said as well.
Where I'm at, I think it's a little more nuanced than all this, right?
I think bearish for what crypto?
Is it bearish for the dinosaur alts that came out of the low float,
high FTV meta?
Yes, probably.
I painted the bear case for the high market cap memes as well. The low float, high FTV meta? Yes, probably.
I painted the bear case for the high market cap memes as well.
I think those are perhaps a bit at risk,
but I don't think the core crypto products are. In fact, I think it's still,
you could probably paint a stronger bull case than a bear case.
I think we're just seeing the early stages of Tradify coming into crypto
and building on crypto rails.
Robinhood's building on Ethereum.
You think X with an Akita beer hire,
maybe they're going to build on Solana.
I don't know what that means for Tia, Celestia.
Is there a world where the opposite exists here?
Where, you know, if I'm on Robinhood and I have some stock, but technically
it could be a tokenized stock in the background,
is this actually bullish crypto bear stocks?
Because people
start trading their stocks
for crypto.
I think you're
the first person
to present that case.
I think the consensus
response is anyone who who has
wanted exposure to crypto as an alternative to stocks already has it
um will robin hood rolling out that access flip that narrative
i think it depends on the volatility and returns.
If people start aping into crypto
and make more than what they were doing in stocks,
that's what brought a lot of us here years ago.
That's what brought me here in 2017
was that the crypto I bought went up way more
than the Facebook stock
or the Twitter stock or whatever other Tesla stock.
So, I mean, price go up is the best advertising.
And if people make a lot of money doing it,
then it's like the momentum of it carries on,
at least in the short to medium term, maybe not the long term.
So give us the banana zone,
and then you're going to see the massive rotation.
This was all part of the thesis, Tyler.
This was all part of the banana zone.
If you're in NVIDIA, pivot to crypto alts before the banana zone.
If you're in crypto alts, pivot to my art bags.
Banana zone.
Well, I think that's a good way to end the conversation here today.
I'm sure this is a topic that we will continue to iterate on and riff on in the weeks to come.
As for today, I think we're going to go ahead and call it there.
I want to thank all of our listeners for tuning in here today.
I want to thank my co-hosts.
We'll be back next Tuesday to recap all the news and big talking points.
Until then, have a fantastic week.
Goodbye. This is a production of WGBH. .
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